Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

David Goodstein, in the opening of his Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics textbook “States of Matter.”

I just started reading "The giant squid" by Fabio Genovesi and I really loved the opening. I couldn't find the official English translation, so here's the original and my rough translation:

Del mare non sappiamo nulla. Nulla di nulla, eppure il mare è quasi tutto. All'inizio c'era solo lui, poi ha concesso un po' di spazio secco e polveroso alla terraferma, e noi subito superbi a dire che il centro del mondo è New York o Pechino, come una volta Babilonia, Atene, Roma, Parigi... invece il centro del mondo è il mare.

We know nothing about the ocean. Nothing at all, and yet the ocean is almost everything. In the beginning there was only the ocean, then it gave a little space - dry and dusty - to the lands, and we immediately haughtily proclaimed that the center of the world is New York or Beijing, like we once did with Babylonia, Athens, Rome or Paris. But instead the center of the world is the ocean.

Let's go with something more somber.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

-Lolita by Nabokov

It's not strictly the opening, because it comes after a fake foreword presenting this, the main text, as a true crime story, written by the criminal himself. It sets the mood quite effectively. These sentences are the equivalent of drawing hearts around the name of your crush. And while the writer is shown to obsess over Lolita, he is only concerned with his own person. His victim is only presented as something within him (poignantly his loins and mouth) and not as a person separate from and outside of him.

And mind: AI could not come up with something like that: No tongue or lips.

“In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.” JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

1984

The clocks striking 13 times immediately makes something feel off

Mom and Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three.

From Lady sings the blues, Billie Holiday's autobiography.

Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all. If the sun that morning had not been burning so warmly in the brassy sky of Phigerinadon II, and if he had not glimpsed the sugar-white and winebarrel-wide backside of Inga-Maria Calyphigia, while she bathed in the stream, he might have paid more attention to his plowing than to the burning pressures of heterosexuality and would have driven his furrow to the far side of the hill before the seductive music sounded along the road. He might never have heard it, and his life would have been very, very different.

"It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men."

• Red Sister, Mark Lawrence.

Good book if you want something a bit like Harry Potter but aimed at a more mature audience and not funding the stripping away of human rights.

Late to the party, but:

A vessel may be defined as an object that keeps the water either in or out; it is the latter sort that concerns us.

The Elements of Seamanship by Roger C Taylor

The building was on fire, and this time it was not my fault.

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Here's an obscure one from See you next Pluterday:

Sam was scratching desperately at the crumbling edge of the abyss. With fear he felt the cramp slowly, but surely, reaching his fingertips. He fell... And...To be quite honest, Sam was not hanging at all above an abyss. And there was no cramp at all in his fingertips. For miles around there wasn’t even a trace of an abyss at whose edge one could scratch in despair. But recently I met with a publisher who confided to me that in judging a manuscript he only glanced at the first sentence. He mustbe on tenterhooks by now.

Can't believe no one has yet proferred the classic:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

-John Dies at the End

And my personal favorite...

I met my guardian angel today. She shot me in the face.

-The Unnoticeables

I was going to post Neuromancer too, but everyone posted that.

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs, began to take hold.

Fear and loathing in las vegas

The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years - if it ever did end - began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.

• It, by Stephen King.

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. First, I visited my wife's grave. Then, I joined the army.

• John Scalzi, Old Man's War

"A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism"

It still gives nightmares to the people who deserve it :)

“Today he would become a god. His mother had told him so.” -- Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

Really, that whole first chapter is incredible. One of those rare books where the first chapter is so compelling that you just have to keep on reading.

Damn, this post honestly reminded me why I love reading. Thanks for that.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

Every single book (all fifteen of them!) in the WoT series starts the same exact way, and I respect the dedication to consistency.

it hits differently these days, but: "The sky above the port was the color of a television, tuned to a dead channel" -William Gibson, Neuromancer

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit.

Lord of Light Roger Zelazny

My favorite opening lines that I didn't see yet are:

Kafka's "Metamorphosis"

“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself changed into a monstrous cockroach in his bed”

Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina"

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

And, Gibson's "Neuromancer"

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

From The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemison

LET’S START WITH THE END of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.

• The Fifth Season

HMM. NO. I’M TELLING THIS WRONG.

• The Obelisk Gate

TIME GROWS SHORT, MY LOVE. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.

• The Stone Sky

The dedications are good too. As are the entire books, go read them. The dedications in respective order:

For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question

To those who have no choice but to prepare their children for the battlefield

To those who’ve survived: Breathe. That’s it. Once more. Good. You’re good. Even if you’re not, you’re alive. That is a victory.

I think the hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy opener is my favorite, but a close second is Albert Camus'

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday.

I know it gets shit on but I legitimately like, "it was a dark and stormy night." There's a reason it became cliche. It's very evocative.

The second cataclysm began in my eleventh life, in 1996. I was dying my usual death, slipping away in a warm morphine haze, which she interrupted like an ice cube down my spine.

— the first fifteen lives of Harry August, by Claire North

"West of House. You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door."

The building was on fire, and it wasn't my fault.

Blood Rites, book 6 of The Dresden Files